Sunday, June 22, 2014

Sheva Baich Declaration of Intention

I was named for my great grandmother, Sheva Fine Baich (and my great grandmother Esther Rutner Joshowitz).  As I wrote earlier, she was born in 1885 in Shklyn, Volhynia, Ukraine when it was part of the Russian Empire, lived through the Holocaust, immigrated to Baltimore in 1947 and died in Baltimore in 1951.

Recently, my father found and gave me the original of her Declaration of Intention, the first step she would have to take to become a United States Citizen.
Sheva Baich Declaration of Intention, 1947

She filed this document only five months after arriving in America--after what she experienced in Europe, this may have been a way to disconnect from Europe.

This document gives another confirmation of my grandmother's recollection that her father Avraham had been born in the village of Huben, and it has a photo of Sheva that I haven't seen before.  It also gives a marriage date and place (Luck is now Lutsk, Ukraine)

As she died 4 years after filing this, she likely was never naturalized.

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